Computational Nanophotonics – Designing Spaces for Light
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Abstract
Computational nanophotonics is one of the central tools of the science of light and photonic device engineering. It plays a crucial role in enabling optical technologies ranging from biosensing to quantum information processing. Up to the present, a plethora of various techniques and commercial software founded on conventional computational electromagnetics methods have been developed. After a brief review of previous work based on the innovative methods of transformation optics, I present a new class of elliptic omnidirectional concentrators focusing light on a disk, a thin strip, or a rod. This study expands the theory of a circular omnidirectional concentrator—an ‘optical black hole’—previously developed by our team, and then experimentally demonstrated at the microwave, at optical spectral bands, and in acoustics. Our ray-tracing and full-wave simulations of new elliptic designs show flawless focusing and absorbing performance at complete acceptance angles.
Then, focus is put on new approaches built on a multiphysics computational framework that gives tighter integration between different phenomena involved in light-matter interaction and offers a broader range of new modeling opportunities. For example, numerical modeling of gain-assisted metamaterials and the use of the experiment-fitted numerical models of gain media will be discussed. The quality of the results is greatly improved by incorporating prior background knowledge of quantum physics of the gain multilevel system into the model. Another example is the computationally non-trivial modeling of the interband part of graphene dispersion in time and frequency domains. We address this problem by substituting the numerically expensive integration in the Kubo surface conductivity model with closed-form representations, which are significantly more efficient for calculations in time and frequency domains. Existing challenges and several specific research aims for future pursuit are also outlined.
Bio
Dr. Alexander V. Kildishev (current h-factor, WEB of Science 41, Google Scholar 44), is an expert in the field of numerical modeling of nanophotonic structures and devices in real-life environments (with a keen interest in negative refractive index metamaterials, optical artificial magnetism, optical cloaking devices, magnifying hyperlenses, loss com-pensation in metamaterials, and plasmonic nanolasers). He is a leader in the design of optical metasurfaces and an active contributor to nanoHUB.org, including the develop-ment of a set of nanophotonics tools with more than 1,700 users served worldwide.
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